He began wearing his trademark eyepatch after losing an eye in a surfing accident while riding a wave in the 1970s.

O’Neill later moved his family south to Santa Cruz, California, where he opened his second shop, and by the 1980s had become the world’s biggest wetsuit designer and manufacturer, though initially his friends didn’t have much faith in his groundbreaking invention.

“All my friends said, ‘O’Neill, you will sell to five friends on the beach and then you will be out of business,’” he remarked, according to his family.

Wanting to surf for longer in the cold waters off the California coast, O’Neill began experimenting with a variety of materials, eventually inventing the first neoprene wetsuit, still worn by surfers to this day.